In this fatiguing chronicle of a gifted musician’s work, quality never equals quantity.
The renowned critic compiles more than four decades of writing about his favorite subject, who he has covered in such books as Invisible Republic (1997) and Like a Rolling Stone (2005).
The collection begins promisingly with Marcus’s most notorious single piece about Dylan, the caustic Rolling Stone critique of the two-LP set Self Portrait (1970). But this selection of album, concert and book reviews, features, liner notes, columns and academic papers is swiftly sabotaged by the author’s humorlessness, myopia and simple bad judgment. As ever, the writer relies on torturously scholastic readings of lyrics, odd and sometimes irrelevant sources and analogs and precious little musical explication to pick apart his thorny and highly inconsistent subject’s work. It doesn’t help that this book surveys nearly 30 years (1970–1997) of generally substandard writing and performing by Dylan. All too often, Marcus falls back on familiar tropes. He regularly flogs 1920s icons like Rabbit Brown, Dock Boggs and the other denizens of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music to make his points, and he hashes over Dylan’s 1965–66 collaborations with The Band—first essayed in Mystery Train (1975)—once too often. The author’s pieces about Dylan’s inspired latter-day work is muddled and uncomprehending. He perplexingly writes off the renascent album Oh Mercy (1989) as a “producer’s album,” yet lauds Time Out of Mind (1997), also helmed by producer Daniel Lanois. At times, his contorted attempts to make an unusual connection are simply wrong-headed. His fantastical 2000 piece relating “Desolation Row” to an 1888 canvas by artist James Ensor is as insupportable as it is egregious. In one review, Marcus assails some writing in Dylan’s memoir Chronicles Volume 1 (2004), saying, “That line calls attention to itself.” The same could be said for almost the entire corpus of the author’s work about Dylan.
In this fatiguing chronicle of a gifted musician’s work, quality never equals quantity.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58648-831-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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